AI-Driven History Initiatives

The New York Times recently partnered with Google in an attempt to digitize historic photos gathered by the newspaper over the years. With an estimated five to seven million photos, Google's AI will have its work cut out for it, as it has to digitize and catalog each photo, as well as the information about when it was published and why. Google and The New York Times' efforts to digitize historic photos serve as an initiative to preserve visual history as some of the photos date back as late as the 19th century and contain a tremendous amount of historical value.

The AI employed for this task will use its machine vision to scan each photo, as well as the handwritten and typed notes affixed to each image. The AI will also categorize the image based on semantic information it gathers from each photo.